Dick Spotswood: Homeowners gather to push for local control

ON WEDNESDAY, the new Citizens Marin alliance will host its first "town hall" meeting. The topic of the 6:30 p.m. event at San Rafael's Al Boro Community Center is "Planning and Affordable Housing Challenges in Marin."

Citizen Marin is comprised of neighborhood and town homeowners organizations, along with some environmentalists, inflamed over the efforts by alphabet agencies including the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) and the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) to abrogate public control of local land-use planning.

The meeting is another sign that increasingly large segments of Marin care enough about their communities' quality of life to devote time and energy to oppose regional governments' power grab.

Combine those groups and potentially real ballot-box power is amassed. If this alliance stays focused, perhaps adding Ross Valley and Twin Cities allies, and then crafts common legislative policies, it will serve Marin homeowners as their so-far underrepresented political voice.

At some point it will manage to get the reluctant attention of both Marin's Board of Supervisors and regional bureaucrats.

It is all instigated by the ABAG/MTC-sponsored One Bay Area Plan. That effort uses a carrot-and-stick approach, forcing the Bay Area's predominately single-family-home communities to impose zoning that facilitates 1970s-style high-density, low-income housing.

The notion of sophisticated individual homeowners combining to convince their elected city council members and county supervisors to act in their interest is threatening. That's especially true for a few veteran county elected officials and special interest groups accustomed to calling the shots.

Certainly, staff and board members at ABAG and MTC are fearful. Their concern is that organized Marinites will ally with similar groups in places like Palo Alto and Danville who are fed up with the regional agencies.

The Marin Community Foundation and its funded me-too groups like the high-density housing-advocating Stand Up for Neighborly Novato, might see their influences reduced by newly empowered homeowners who resent being told how to plan their communities' future.

Democracy and popular outrage should be threatening to entrenched power, be it in Washington, Sacramento or the local civic center.

Expect housing advocates and developers who favor One Bay Area's one-size-fits-all planning model to show up at Wednesday's town hall. They will attempt to dominate the open-microphone period that Citizen Marin's organizers scheduled at the program's end.

That's their right given the session's format.

These folks should resist the tactic by some on the far political left denouncing opponents of One Bay Area as racists. That tired stunt lost its power to intimidate by the early 1990s. These folks need to take a deep breath, lighten up and understand there are legitimate arguments on both sides of the housing debate.

There are enough extremists over-agitated about this and almost every other contemporary American policy issue without name-calling good people who are simply defending community control of planning.

To paraphrase the writer Thomas Sowell, housing activists seem to assume that if you don't believe in their particular solutions, then you really don't care about the people they claim to help.

Citizen Marin's task is to prove the "housers" and the alphabet agencies are wrong. They must demonstrate far better and more environmentally sensitive methods to create inclusive communities than following the failed high-density housing project model.

Columnist Dick Spotswood of Mill Valley now shares his views on local politics twice weekly in the IJ. His email address is spotswood@comcast.net.